HashiCorp Unifies Open Source IT Infrastructure Management

When it comes to IT infrastructure management, many IT organizations have opted to employ open source tools such as Packer, Terraform and Consul as alternatives to commercial offerings, mainly because getting budget approval for IT management software can be a challenge.

Kevin Fishner, director of customer success at HashiCorp, says Atlas provides a workflow framework that enables IT organizations to mix and match various open source tools as they see fit. In addition to Packer, Terraform and Consul, Atlas integrates Vagrant, Serf and Vault open source projects to address DevOps issues in a way that most IT organizations can actually afford, says Fishner.

By unifying all these tools under Atlas, Fishner says that HashiCorp is enabling approximately half a million IT professionals that use some subset of these tools to better collaborate with one another. Though it is initially available as a hosted service managed by HashiCorp, Fishner says the plan is to make an on-premise version of Atlas available later this year. Pricing for the hosted version of Atlas is $40 per node per month, with the first 10 nodes being free.

Over time, Fishner says that it’s clear that the sheer number of IT professionals contributing code to open source IT infrastructure management projects will simply overwhelm most commercial products in the category. Not only will those projects deliver updates faster, but also the peer review process associated with open source code will result in higher-quality implementations, says Fishner.

Fishner says the opportunity to generate revenue should not stem from the tools themselves, but rather the management layer that turns all of those open source IT parts into something that is greater than the whole.

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